Meet the 2011 Sundance Filmmakers | New Crop for Monday

Meet the 2011 Sundance Filmmakers | New Crop for Monday

Another four filmmaker interviews join indieWIRE‘s “Meet the 2011 Sundance Filmmakers” series today, continuing this year’s series spotlighting the festival’s filmmakers ahead of the event, which kicks off January 20.

Soon after the Sundance Film Festival unveiled its 2011 lineup, indieWIRE invited directors with films in the Sundance U.S. Dramatic & Documentary Competitions, as well as the World Dramatic & Documentary Competitions and NEXT section, to submit responses in their own words about their films. indieWIRE has been the place to get to know the Sundance filmmakers ahead of the festival for more than a half-dozen years.

Over 50 in the four sections provided their responses and indieWIRE will roll them out daily through the start of the festival later this month.

A snapshot of Monday’s four featured interviews:

Oscar-nominated actress Vera Farmiga steps behind the camera for the first time with her debut feature film “Higher Ground,” competing in the U.S. Dramatic Competition. Inspired by the memoirs of Carolyn Briggs, “Higher Ground” is a coming-of-age tale that charts one woman’s spiritual journey through life. As Farmiga (who also stars in the film), revealed to indieWIRE, she was inspired to direct after becoming fed up with the scripts that were landing on her doorstep. “A year ago,” she said,” I was outside at my burn pile tending to the smoldering coals of autumn brush and scripts featuring pathetic excuses for female characterization when my manager Jon called and offered some sound advice: “Stop asking for permission.” What a notion! Create my own opportunity.”

Also slated for the U.S. Dramatic Competition is Drake Doremus’ follow-up to his Sundance entry “Douchebag,” “Like Crazy,” a love story of the purest kind. On coming back to Sundance with a drama this time around, Doremus said, “Going into it with a comedy last year I was so nervous about audience reaction in the room, but this year with a drama, I’m more excited to let the movie sink in and not worry about laughs. I love Sundance audiences. I think they are comprised of some of the most film-savvy audiences in the world. They are hungry for great work and they are rooting for it.”

Over in the U.S. Documentary Competition is Jon Foy’s “Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles.” In it, Foy recounts how a young artist, Justin Duerr, became fascinated with a horde of tiles containing cryptic messages that were found embedded in the asphalt of city streets around the world. “Believe it or not, I first met Justin, the protagonist, by prank calling him,” Foy told indieWIRE. “The call was directed at his roommate, but Justin mistook it as a breakthrough in the mystery he’d been pursuing. So I introduced myself in order to apologize for the misunderstanding. Right then, as I met him, it just clicked and I told him we’d make this into a movie one day. That was summer 2000. Five years later I dropped out of school and moved back to start filming.”

Meanwhile filmmaker Leonard Retel Helmrich follows up his award winning documentaries “The Eye of the Day” and “Shape of the Moon” with “Position Among the Stars” (World Cinema Documentary Competition). The film provides an in-depth portrait of Indonesia through the eyes of one family living in the slums of Jakarta. Helmrich cited fiction films as the reason he got into filmmaking: “As a juvenile I saw the films of Sergio Leone, like “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” and “Once Upon a Time in the West,” he told indieWIRE. “It really moved me that you can tell a story by using camera movements. At first I wasn’t aware that it was the camera movements that inspired me to become a filmmaker, but when I became a filmmaker and moved from fiction to documentary I learned myself how to make camera movements by intuition. “

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Zhao said with her Bass Reeves biopic, she’ll direct a more traditional cast like she did with her first-timers: “You can work with an actor in a certain way, you can create an environment like Terrence Malick has always done.”